Tag Archives: voting

Pick One

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Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill that returns the ability to vote to felons when certain conditions are met.  However, in his piece at the link, Arian Campo-Flores wrote

Under the bill, the state doesn’t automatically restore rights to felons who completed their sentences but have outstanding fines, fees, or restitution—common for many released from prison.

That’s a misunderstanding of the law and of the Florida Constitutional Amendment that prompted it. Either the felon has completed his sentence, or he has not. If he still has outstanding fines, fees, or restitution, he hasn’t completed his sentence.

Being released from prison is an important milestone, but it in no way signifies completion of anything. Here is Florida’s Voting Restoration Amendment as it appeared on the ballot:

Constitutional Amendment Article VI, Section 4. Voting Restoration Amendment This amendment restores the voting rights of Floridians with felony convictions after they complete all terms of their sentence including parole or probation. The amendment would not apply to those convicted of murder or sexual offenses, who would continue to be permanently barred from voting unless the Governor and Cabinet vote to restore their voting rights on a case by case basis.

The Amendment passed, and this is how it appears in the Florida Constitution [non-italicized emphasis added]

Article VI, Section 4. Disqualifications.—
(a) No person convicted of a felony, or adjudicated in this or any other state to be mentally incompetent, shall be qualified to vote or hold office until restoration of civil rights or removal of disability. Except as provided in subsection (b) of this section, any disqualification from voting arising from a felony conviction shall terminate and voting rights shall be restored upon completion of all terms of sentence including parole or probation.
(b) No person convicted of murder or a felony sexual offense shall be qualified to vote until restoration of civil rights.

All terms of their sentence means all terms, not some of them.

Felons Voting

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That’s what Democratic Socialist and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (I, VT) thinks ought to happen.  He couches this as all citizens having a right to vote, “even terrible people.”

Unfortunately, though, Sanders has misunderstood the nature of the social compact, and the Lockean nature of our American social compact.

Certainly, all American citizens ought to be able to vote in American elections.  However, felons, by dint of their voluntarily done criminal acts, have placed themselves outside the bounds of our social compact—they’ve made themselves outlaws in several senses of that term.  As felons under the terms of our social compact (Locke’s terms went a bit farther), these persons have surrendered a number of their citizen rights: freedom of movement, of keeping/bearing weapons, of association, of communication, and from search and seizure, among others.  Felons still can do many of these things, but they are severely restricted in the doing (and in some, completely barred) by the requirements of law and the strictures of the prison in which they’re held as those requirements are executed.

Since felons are outlaws, also, though, they’ve surrendered one more right of citizenship: the right to vote.

Heads in the Sand

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There is a Defcon computer security conference in progress at which a Voting Village hackers collection is busily hacking various voting machine manufacturers’ machines.  As McMillan and Volz put it in their Wall Street Journal piece about the Village,

These hacks can root out weaknesses in voting machines so that vendors will be pressured to patch flaws and states will upgrade to more secure systems, organizers say.

Sadly, many of those manufacturers are upset over it, even to the point of warning about voting software license abuse.  Even State government representatives don’t like the idea of testing this software’s and these machines’ security.  Here’s Leslie Reynolds, National Association of Secretaries of State Executive Director:

Anybody could break into anything if you put it in the middle of a floor and gave them unlimited access and unlimited time[.]

To a small extent, that’s a valid beef.  But only to a small extent: that direct access “in the middle of a floor.”  However, malicious hackers—for instance, Russian hackers, to say nothing of Iranian, People’s Republic of China’s, northern Korean’s, each of whom also have an interest in sowing doubt and causing outright disruption—have lots of time between now and our November elections, and they’ve had the last couple of years (at the least) already—a good approximation of unlimited time relative to the evolution of software and hardware.

In addition, Reynolds’ argument is a bit of a strawman.  No one is representing this hack-athon as the last word in the security investigation.  It is, though, a highly useful step in the process of locating security failures (vulnerabilities being a too-soft term) so they can be patched.

Election Systems & Software LLC, a leading manufacturer of voting equipment, was reluctant to have its systems tested at the conference. … Hackers “will absolutely access some voting systems internal components because they will have full and unfettered access to a unit without the advantage of trained poll workers, locks, tamper-evident seals, passwords, and other security measures that are in place in an actual voting situation.”

Sure.  Our stuff don’t stink, so there’s nothing to see here.  Move along.  Don’t investigate because we don’t want to know the problems.  They’d be invalid, anyway.

Jeanette Manfra, a senior cybersecurity official at DHS, actually sympathized with concerns that Village hackers could unintentionally lower Americans’ confidence in our election systems.  She’s wrong, though.  Responsible persons’ hiding their heads under their pillows, chanting, “La la la, I don’t hear you” are the ones lowering our confidence.  Pretending problems don’t exist is a thin shield, indeed, against those problems’ exploitation.

No.  The more objections there are to investigating and testing the security of our voting system, the more badly we need those investigations and tests.

Voter Fraud

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Progressive-Democrats like to decry claims of voter fraud, denying the very existence of it and deprecating those who worry about its impact on elections, even as they worry—correctly—about Russian attempts to alter our elections.

However.

Non-American citizens are increasingly found on voter rolls thanks to covert registration methods, with nothing actually stopping them from casting a ballot in an election.

For instance,

Elizaveta Shuvalova, a Russian citizen who became a US citizen only last year, was registered as an eligible voter in 2012 and added to the San Francisco voter rolls, The Washington Times reported.

She was perplexed to find herself in the voter rolls, saying she wasn’t an American citizen and didn’t even register to vote.
…
The woman’s voter log shows that she signed up as a Democrat in July 2012.

It’s not just California [emphasis added].

The Public Interest Legal Foundation…found that nearly 5,600 people on the voter rolls in Virginia were deemed as non-citizens, with a third of them voting in previous elections.

These same Progressive-Democrats object to Voter ID laws, too.